Sausage roll row: US 'invents' new summer snack

There has been a British outcry on social media after a US chain claimed to have invented a new summer snack that looks suspiciously like a sausage roll. Supermarket Trader Joe’s has called it the “Puff Dog”.Los Angeles-based lifestyle website Hello Giggles said it was “genius”.However, the UK’s The Mirror newspaper was less impressed. “Sausage roll given ridiculous new name,” read its headline on Saturday. Although other European countries also have a centuries-old fondness for meat wrapped in pastry, the UK has made the sausage roll its own. British bakery chain Greggs sells more than 2.5 million of them every week. It is typically a pork sausage wrapped in puff pastry, although the Puff Dog has opted to use beef.

Hello Giggles could have saved itself the backlash by looking in its own archive.In 2015, it covered a previous twitterstorm when the New York Times published a sausage roll recipe.”There are two sides to the social media storm that ensued following the release of the recipe. Americans don’t know what a sausage roll is, and the Brits can’t believe we haven’t experienced them yet,” wrote Hello Giggles at the time. Americans are often more familiar with their version of “pigs in blankets” – a sausage wrapped in hard pastry, as opposed to puff pastry. In the UK, “pigs in blankets” are sausages wrapped in bacon, which are often served with Christmas dinner.

Yet can the UK really claim the last laugh?Earlier this year, a large part of the Spanish-speaking world was amused when the UK’s Costa Coffee chain appeared to conceive the cortado coffee. The cortado – a small coffee with a dash of milk – has long been popular in cafes from Spain to Argentina.Yet sandwich boards spotted outside Costa Coffee in April heralded: “The next big thing in coffee.””2017: England invents the cortado,” read one widely shared, tongue-in-cheek tweet (in Spanish), accompanied by a picture of the advert.”Clearly, the recurring Gibraltar issue is not the only pending dispute between Spain and the United Kingdom,” joked Spanish news site 20 Minutos. Meanwhile, a civil war was almost sparked earlier this month when the BBC started its own in-fight over pasties.

BBC Radio Devon teased its colleagues over the country border in Cornwall by suggesting, on Twitter, that the Cornish pasty – its beloved meat-and-potato pastry – hailed from Devon.It came after one of the station’s guests referenced a study by historian Dr Todd Gray from Exeter (which is in Devon), who says he can trace the earliest record of the pasty to 16th-Century Devon.BBC Radio Cornwall was outraged and tweeted back a warning against ever questioning the Cornish pasties origins. “Lovely Cornish peeps, please tell @BBCDevon why the Cornish Pasty is OURS!”, it wrote.